Altify vs. Sage CRM

Altify is very well suited for customer relationship mapping and for use on very large, long term and complex deals. Altify is created and represented as an enterprise-level tool, but even some of its functions are too overbuilt for enterprise level sales activities. Altify is a tool best utilized only for the top level of complex deals within an organization. Features such as customer relationship mapping do have use and benefit for mid to large level deals and is arguably the most valuable tool in the Altify suite. After nearly a year using Altify, my recommendation on its use would be to enable account plans, account management, opportunity management, and sales process manager only to the top strategic account reps in the organization, realizing that they are probably best used purely out of the box as any customizations create other complications. For the rest of the sales teams, the customer relationship mapping feature is the one tool reps would gain the most value out of.

Incentivized

as it is a very flexible software that can be adapted to any business model, other functions human resource management, manufacturing and supply chain planning, all these functions are housed in a highly technological interface. I liked this system because it made automating accounts payable so much easier.the control of the basic accounting of any type of company

• Organization chart: really well integrated with SFDC and the visual is easy.
• Profile recommendations in Org chart: great coaching builtin to be fair, but it's tough on your thought process.
• Plan overview and POV hit the mark on what is most important.
• Love the idea of using this with the prospect for early stage alignment and coaching.

Incentivized

• When in client profile, it is very intuitive, allowing you to easily transcribe notes in the clients profile.
• Sage allows 3rd party plugins, so if you utilize a particular phone services or would like to import something as simple as google drive, its compatible.

Incentivized

• Sales Process Manager: The Altify Sales Process manager's biggest drawback is the lack of usability for the end user. Altify has an out of the box sales process or a custom one can be created based on the company sales process. The drawback is that unless the sales process includes very few items, it can be more cumbersome than helpful. The Rep walks through the Sales Process by selection whether they have "Completed" are "In Progress" or have "Not Completed" the sales process activities at each stage of the opportunity. Altify saves after each selection so there is considerable downtime as the user waits for their selection to be recorded before they can answer the next question. Altify has an option to automatically advance the Salesforce opportunity Sales Stage once a certain % or mandatory steps in the sales process are completed, however this is not entirely useful as it does not advance until the set % or mandatory marked processes within a Sales Stage are completed AS WELL as at least one process from the next sales stage. This becomes very confusing and cumbersome for the users. In most cases, the sales process manager becomes more of a micromanagement tool with managers requiring all items to be marked completed and the Users merely marking items to satisfy that requirement without getting the intended benefit of the guided selling experience.
• Account Plans: Account Plans can be grouped in both "does well" and "does poorly" for the Altify Suite. I will outline the bad in this portion of the review. Altify Account Plans do have some ability for customization, however the standard out of the box options are incredibly overbuilt. Filling out all of the information within the Account Plan can consume 40+ man hours for a single Account. While some of this information can be useful and important to note, other portions become more cumbersome than useful. The Completeness and Scorecard portions of the use a number of calculations. These calculations are explained at the bottom of the page but from a user perspective are very confusing and not straightforward. Most users that begin using account plans quickly abandon them because of the difficulty in setting them up correctly and the minimal insights that are gleaned out of the work put into them. One place for the greatest opportunity to improve account plans is in the objectives section, there the user can set objectives and activities (tasks) to meet them. The tasks must be manually selected to create an actual task in Salesforce and this cannot be assigned out to other SF Users. This portion of the Account plan would be improved if it could be used as a holistic account management platform to manage tasks across all the opportunities and potential opportunities, with an ability to assign them out to others in Salesforce within the account team.
• Altify Max Insights: Altify max insights is intended to provide coaching advice at the opportunity level. This feature is tied into the opportunity manager. The drawback to this feature is that the insight mainly pertains to whether or not a user filled out all the steps in the opportunity manager: the sales process, the opportunity assessment, strategy, and the customer relationship map. The insights are far less action-oriented and more of a reminder to use the tool components. This tool just doesn't hold value, especially as it is an add on product.
• Lack of Customization - While Altify does allow customization of some of their products and components, Altify has a ton of limitations. One of the most frustrating aspects is that all of the processes happen from their "black box" which is the dealmaker opportunity objects that Altify creates. This is essentially a shadow copy of the opportunities within Salesforce that then push changes to the actual opportunity. There is no way to tap into this shadow opportunity to either run custom processes or to even surface the Altify insights in a BI tool such as Einstein. This means that a lot of the use and functionality that Altify does do well cannot be leveraged for company insights or user end improvements.

Incentivized

• Reliance on Apache Tomcat causes a lot of headaches. There are common issues trying to start up the server, resulting from Apache Tomcat misconfigurations, or Java. Some forum posts on Sage City address common issues, but digging into server logs seems to be an often occurrence.
• Support is somewhat lacking, less user install base means error messages are sometimes hard to find quick answers for. Most of the knowledge found on the internet is in the Sage City forum.
• Integration with Microsoft 365 causes you to have to turn off some security features. This will result in your 365 tenants running lower security standards than recommended, it may put you at risk for targeted attacks.

Incentivized

There are really no other words to say, it is a very easy to use application that is more straightforward and has provided better results with the bulk of features that appeal to a very broad amount of users. There may be other CRM platforms out there that are more prevalent, but I have found them to be much more clunky and less intuitive than Sage CRM.

Incentivized

Excellent integration with the most important social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to get leads. The mobile app is quite useful for speeding up the tasks at hand and not relying on the computer or being in the office to get them done.

Incentivized

Sage works very quickly based on the network you are using it on. It is internet based so if your network is slow, it will perform slowly. Reports seem to run reasonably fast, if there is too much information it is trying to populate that could slow it down a little. When Sage CRM is integrated with a Sage ERP product it doesn't tend to slow down either system at all

Support team is really slow and they need to work on this really. Sometimes it takes days to resolve a simple query and there is no way to get it expedited. Rest the product is is amazing but the team should look into the costumer support and get it working

Incentivized

Most training would come after a upgrade. Otherwise we would self teach new employees. Training was with a Sage Software partner SWK technologies.

Incentivized

The implementation and upgrades were rather quick and straight forward. Attempting to link Sage CRM with Sage 100 ERP however was a nightmare and will be avoided by us in the future due to numerous issues.

Incentivized

While Skuid is not a match to what Altify does in terms of capabilities, Skuid did allow us to natively create the functions that we needed within the business in a way that was more useful than the Altify tools out of the box functionality. Altify does not offer anything for a more "light touch" opportunity, which is its greatest drawback. With Skuid we were able to create our own solution for these lighter touch opportunities

Incentivized

Whilst SAGE CRM was selected around 10 years ago and we became a partner, the main contenders would have been at the time Sales Logix and MS CRM 4.0. However, we had extensive experience of the mid-market CRM's and decided on SAGE CRM since it had a clean, easy to understand interface and importantly offered both workflow automation and Self Service capability, all of which across both the Case and Sales and Marketing functionality was seamless and saved time. As it was pure browser based, access was from anywhere we wanted. In my view, SAGE CRM still stacks up well against all the other mid-market CRM systems and offers good value for money, but more importantly, it is an easy to operate and customisable solution which user like. Again, we can teach administration users very quickly to support and customise themselves since the admin. function are clear as well.

• Shows management that we have a strategy.
• Forces critical and honest thinking about gaps in your account knowledge.

Incentivized

• It is very affordable in pricing, compared to competitors
• Lead management and convertion into prospects is also a very easy process
• Lead capture from web pages should be available, and better ways to capture leads from tradeshows by uploading directly from scanned business cards

Incentivized